Panetta: Cyber Threat is at a Pre 9/11 Moment

Panetta: Cyber Threat is at a Pre 9/11 Moment

The United States must beef up its cyber defenses or suffer as it did on September 11, 2001 for failing to see the warning signs ahead of that
devastating terrorist attack, the Secretary of Defense told a group of business leaders in New York Thursday night.

Well thats not the greatest thing in the world to read, you have on one hand, the defense Secretary telling us we are pre 9/11, on the other hand you
have mainstream media plastering it on every front page...

As well as the comments that "The U.S. knows the culprits of all the recent attacks, but chooses not divulge who the responsible parties were.

and then..

after reading this article just a few hours ago..

www.dailycamera.com...
( i would just like to add that this particular article citing Panetta who within blames Iran for the worst cyber attack on the private sector, EVER,
regarding the recent attacks on oil companies. A pretty big accusation! )

These things are going to become more common, because they are excuses for implementing monitoring and control of the Internet so that it will be
illegal to be anonymous.

Its ironic that the hacker group Anonymous are actually part of making it harder to be anonomous on the web.

Maybe you have noticed how much attention the false flag attacks are getting on the Internet. When future kids grow up, they will use the Internet to
learn much about what is going on, and naturally, the powers that be would want to control the flow of information on the Internet so the kids have to
get their information from the controlled mass media instead.

If they are going to control it, they have to make it possible to find people who post sensitive information, as well as having control over large
sites such as google and youtube.

Some excuses for the monitoring and control that will be used include:

- Protecting you from cyber criminals who steal your money
- Protecting you from identify theft (someone posts in your name on the Internet so employers can see it)
- Protecting you from being hacked (monitoring allows police to see what occured, similar to the excuse used to have cameras all over society)

You get the picture. It will always be sold as protecting you. And thats why they are going to scare you first so you think you need it.

Its always the same methods and it still works, to my amazement.

CNN and the other mainstream news channels have military psychological operations staff employed to filter and manipulate the news, insert false
stories, and so on, since around 1997. Lots of documentaries about that if you are interested. Its called Perception Management.

Edit: I got a private message about what documentary I was talking about here, so Im updating this post with a link to it. Its called "Psywar". It
covers some of what is described in these articles and more.

I feel sorry for these old time US elite, the Internet totally put a spanner in their plans.

Information is freely available to everyone on the planet, good info, bad info.. any info. If anyone wants to look into something they can and that
makes things difficult.

but, there is a threat i rekn, not just from the Chinese but also from some rogue, pi55ed of hacker!
Imagine if James Holmes had the skills of Gary McKinnon.. could the big big red button, became a keyboard stroke?

If its a Maniac wanting to let missiles fly, a modern day robin hood looking to do bad on the large corporations or some Chinese operation to shut
down the power grid... you cant deny there is a wide open window for an attack.

The freedom of information we enjoy just happens to be the highway with which this threat rides on..

- Government continued to expand intellectual property laws instead of promoting competition and innovation. This intelectual property "obesity"
created the environment where "CHINA CHINA CHINA!" Cyber espionage is the excuse for everything. That perception, strongly seeded by Government,
reinforced the losing proposition that ~Government~ must be the Cyber solution. Reduces freedom and innovation.

- Government, Russia and US, continued to escalate Cyber out of the crime and espionage rings to direct geopolitical infrastructure attacks knowing
full well that their own infrastructures had "more to lose" than anyone else in sheer panic. Not even in kinetic damage - the ~panic~ is what they
really want.

- Government wants to create Nation-State Intranets for themselves while simultaneously criticizing other Governments (e.g. China, Iran) who do the
same thing. This causes other lesser-developed Governments to believe they have to do the same thing, allowing emerging markets like those in East
Africa to fall into technology control regimes that are then easier for radical Islamists or others to seed MORE extremism. Thus making sue the cycle
from Cyber to "legacy" terror threats can feed off each other.

Etc. etc. etc.

This environment is a closed-cycle masterpiece of Government FUD..

There is time to stop the momentum of this shift but the Security professionals are so enriched as a byproduct they're entirely too comfortable to
care.

The "Maker" culture is what will save us from ourselves this cycle of stupidity - bring out the engineer in all of our kids, let them compete and
solve in the most agile and local ways feasible, ..

Cyber fears are greatly exaggerated today but at the pace we stupidly reinforce the fear, it might not be too far off in the future. Way to go
Government! *headdesk* -Mags

taking away rights sometimes isn't a bad thing if it wakes people up to the fact they actually had them to begin with

oh and yes, these multi billion dollar corps should have better security for der websites.. i read on a hax0r forum about someone getting admin access
(they provided screenshots) to some oil companies website and being able all transactions made just by using sql injection that you can find as an
example how *not* to get hacked on goog

Lots of development tools protect against these kinds of attacks, however, loads of corporate websites have cobbled together PHP-based public facing
websites that are directly connected to their "private" corporate networks. There are numerous other techniques that anyone with a modicum of
programming knowledge can pull off to compromise these networks if they're that way inclined.

I have been thinking about the same thing, i remember in ninth grade me and my friends were really into pulling pranks on people through their
computers by sending them random error messages or turning their monitors off, opening their disk drive etc.. And i had one friend who taught all of
this to us and gave us the program, and what amazed me was that he was still in middle school and a year younger, and he figured all of this out
through the internet, flash forward ten years later, i wonder whats really going on right underneath our noses!

Exactly! whats truly scary to me is the fact we all know they would love to have total and free reign of the internet as they do TV, with a few major
players owning the entire space divvying out what they feel is good for business rather than whats good for us..Now to see steps to carry it out is
like reading a fiction book and watching it come to life before your eyes!

Originally posted by eightfold
I do worry that if we keep bombing people "back into the stone age" a small group of teenage kids in some far away land is going to start turning
off our power stations.

Think smaller - it's actually a general rule that hitting the "bigger" systems would be easier to respond to as well. Fundamentally, beside the
panic, the response would be the same as in bad rolling blackouts, bad storms, etc. and people live through those every year just fine. Even in the
hotest or coldest times of year it's still a panic situation as opposed to mass casualties.

On the other hand, should an adversary decide to go that route, the smart ones would go for a major hospital's HVAC. Something a bit more specific so
they can plan a more pervasive outage and likely combine it with a kinetic effect they can back "on the ground" with just one or two people should
it be needed.

Originally posted by Jordan River
China builds our technology.... and china knows the back door secrets into it as well... DUhh it cant be stopped

That's a highly overstated risk and entirely unnecessary when the existing state of hardware supply chain security and software security doesn't
even require the investment of staged backdoors. China itself is also the worst example of an adversary for every but Congress. The really good
players in this space are still Russia, Japan, France, and Israel. Emerging Brazil is getting better too.

The irony in all of this Cyber espionage and sometimes FUD is that China is quickly becoming the most attractive ~target~ as well. That's for another
thread..

Regardless - for me the realities, however grim, are nothing compared to the Statist controls that keep coming down the pipeline. This idea that
information "wants" to be Free and the Internet will always be free is completely bunk. That's a Western sensibility only applicable for the
"haves" - this could create a whole lot more "have nots" to exercise continued control over, false flags, etc. -Mags

The attackers will hit a power grid and. , no one will be able to pump gas , bank, or pay with credit cards to buy food or anything! ....I say, keep
cash on you and the car filled up! .....It's not "IF" this will happen.....it's "WHEN" ?

Internet freedom doesn't have long to go, it has been useful for destabilizing the middle east but not good for controlling the public and concealing
a government's lies. Islamic extremists are very unsophisticated (unless helped) The scenarios below could only be caused by a government with
Stuxnet-level knowledge.

If you think about it, it is the perfect false flag.. No witnesses to contradict the official story.. This act of cyber terrorism will be used to
impose control of the internet.

"The Defense Secretary also appeared to declassify some new information, warning that intruders infiltrated computer control systems that “operate
chemical, electricity and water plants and those that guide transportation throughout the country.” It’s not clear who was behind this attack.
Panetta expressed concern that an “aggressor nation or extremist group” could deploy cyber weapons to derail passenger trains, contaminate the
water supply, shut down the power grid or amplify a physical attack.
Panetta also specifically addressed the denial of service (DDoS) cyber attacks of recent weeks on major lenders like J.P. Morgan Chase (JPM) and U.S.
Bancorp (USB)."

Stop buying and trading with communist china, America got along fine when china was a cold war enemy, now all china does is steals American jobs and
technology but still builds its military like its ready to take America on.

I have a friend that works at a power company in the Carolina's and it runs the grid for a few states. They just got the red flag someone is trying
to hack their system...so..keep cash on you, and your car filled with gas.

This content community relies on user-generated content from our member contributors. The opinions of our members are not those of site ownership who maintains strict editorial agnosticism and simply provides a collaborative venue for free expression.